Anglo Chauvinist Pigs?

Contributed by Gwendolyn Beetham
So, there’s been crazy debate from all sides lately on Ariel Levy’s book Female Chauvinist Pigs. I can’t help but wonder what she’d think of a recent Guardian article by Kira Cochrane on the British paper The Sun’s “Page 3” models. In case you’re not as much of an anglophile as me (and how could you be?), you should know that- every day – Page 3 of The Sun shows topless pictures of women. Yes, every day. Just like the photo of “Nikkala, aged 23, from Middlesex” above. I kid you not.
Cochrane, taking a somewhat Levyesque perspective, writes that:

…Now young women tend to label the topless photos “empowering” and “liberating”. A recent survey of 2,000 15-19-year-old girls found that 67% considered “glamour model” their ideal profession. Faced daily with the evidence that women have to be sexually attractive to be considered successful why wouldn’t young women choose to make a profession of it…With the proliferation of these images, is it any surprise that young women have further embraced it?

However, Cochrane also gives props to:

…a growing number of women…starting to speak out about objectification, beginning a debate on how the mainstreaming of porn imagery affects women and indeed men, socially and personally. Groups that campaign specifically against sexism and objectification are growing at a huge rate…

I say right-on, but I must also make a full (frontal, hee hee) disclosure: in college a few friends and I posed topless in front of a bunch of the page 3 girls that were pasted up in our co-ed common room (don’t ask) and sent a copy of the photo – nipples strategically covered—out to almost the entire campus as a birthday party invite. Were we embracing our sexuality? Falling prey to the patriarchal culture of pornography? Or did we just want to throw a really kick-ass party?